SALT RSS longslit pipeline

What is it?

The pipeline is designed to take raw science and calibration data from the instrument and process it in such a way to yield scientifically useful output data. This process, in a nutshell, includes the following functions:

  1. Instrumental detrending, incl. overscan subtraction, flat-fielding and gain-corrrection, mosaicing and to some degree cosmic ray rejection
  2. Wavelength calibration using a 2-D wavelength map derived by fitting a spectrograph model to observed line traces from ARC frames.
  3. Subtraction of night-sky emission lines and continuum emission without rectifying (and thus interpolating) the actual data.
  4. Source detection, tracing and finally extraction of the integrated 1-D spectrum.

All steps are handled in the correct sequence and do NOT require user-interaction (but some options for tweaking exist), thus allowing for a largely-automatic reduction of large amounts of observational data in a short timescale to maximize scientific productivity.

Where can I get it and what do I need?

The SALT/RSS longslit pipeline comes in two different parts:

  1. A modified version of the official PySALT software package developed and maintained by SAAO. The main modification is that my version is a stand-alone python package, whereas the official pysalt is first and foremost an IRAF/PyRAF module (mostly using python)
    You can get my version via github: https://github.com/rkotulla/pysalt. Follow the instructions there on how to download and install it (hint: use python setup.py install)
  2. The actual rss-longslit pipeline, available from https://github.com/rkotulla/SALT_RSS_longslit_pipeline.